My pal, Gavin Dawson, made a great point this morning on the MSP that a lot of commentators are missing.

The Olympic overtime rules really hurt the U.S. team because they call for four-on-four for 20 minutes. I know the NHL uses it for the short regular-season overtime, but in the playoffs — when it really counts, the NHL plays five-on-five in overtime, for as long as it takes.

When you have all the superstars, four-on-four hockey is a huge advantage. You give the great players more room and they’re tough to stop. Sidney Crosby could have been the goat of that game, what with messing up a breakaway in the third period. But the open ice he got in the four-on-four overtime turned the game — and his sports legacy — around.

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Wow. That’s about all you can say about this story.

Customers at the Bend, Ore., Home Depot can get impatient when the middle-aged woman in gardening cannot quite process a simple question — “Where are the light bulbs?” — and asks them to write the words on the pad she carries. But sometimes that is what it takes before she can answer, “Oh, Aisle 4.”

Twenty-six years after a near-fatal bicycle accident left her comatose for two months and with permanent brain injuries, the saleswoman, Barbara Buchan, performs many actions more slowly than others. But on Wednesday in Beijing, she did one thing in world-record time.

Buchan, at 52 the oldest member of the United States Paralympic team, broke the record and won the gold medal for her disability class in the individual 3,000-meter cycling pursuit. For a woman who has lived without a quarter of her left-temporal brain and with serious physical and cognitive problems since her accident in 1982 while competing for a spot on the United States cycling team, the moment capped a remarkable comeback that has lasted longer than many of her competitors have been alive.

Thanks, Jack, for finding it.

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“BTW, Spain balled their asses off – can’t wait till Rubio makes it to the league. He’s a gem. Portland should be nice too, with Oden AND Rudy Fernandez coming in (did you see that nasty one-hand over Dwight Howard, are you kidding???)”

And he wants to play for the U.S. Olympic team the next time around. Not sure how that will fit with Jerry Colangelo’s team-first concept, but four years is a long time from now.

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There are a lot of people who apparently have solved the mystery of international basketball and I congratulate them. But I’ve yet to come to grips with it. Honestly, time for a confession: I still, after all these years, don’t understand why the U.S. team doesn’t massacre every team it plays.

I watched every second of the gold-medal game and I still can’t figure out how Spain was able to keep it close. That’s because you can tell me all night about how good Juan Carlos Navarro is, what an international star Pau Gasol is, how terrific Ricky Rubio is and what a wonderful prospect Rudy Fernandez is — I’m sorry, those guys are good players but none of them would have had ANY CHANCE to make the U.S. team this summer, let alone start for it.

How does this happen? How does a team with talent plainly not in the same league (literally) as another, come so close to pulling off an upset? Really — other than horrible coaching — how could the U.S. ever have let another country win an Olympic gold medal in men’s basketball? EVER?

Yes, I understand basketball is a team game. But it’s not as if any of these teams is running an intricate Princeton offense or doing anything on defense that the U.S. players have never seen before. Folks, this stuff isn’t spinal-cord surgery. The team with the best players should win, particularly when the talent gap is as wide as it is in the Olympics.

Let me first deal with one cliche answer to that question that I don’t buy for a moment — that these international teams have been playing together for years and that’s a big advantage over the all-star squads thrown together by the U.S.

Sorry, I don’t believe that. Those guys playing for Spain spend a good portion of the year playing for other teams, spread out in leagues all over the world. It’s not as if they are together 12 months a year, every year. And even if they were, I am not convinced it’s a huge advantage to have been together so long — not compared to the difference in talent, at least. If experience as a team really mattered, you’d see some sign of that on defense, where the Spain team was pretty inadequate.

I think there is something to the idea that basketball success always seems to come to teams with role players and the U.S. never seems to have the nerve to pick such players for an Olympic team. The closest it has come is this year’s team, where Michael Redd and Tayshaun Prince served in that capacity — although not for major minutes.

I think there’s also something to the theory that the three-point line is too close, which makes the shot too easy and, on a night when a team gets unreasonably hot from long distance, it can become the ultimate equalizer.

In the end, I admit I’m guessing. I can’t figure it out. So I will sit back and listen to all these basketball experts tell me how much the rest of the world has caught up with us. And then I’ll sit back and watch other countries win games with a roster of players that are, for the most part, lucky to make an NBA roster.

Yes, the rest of the world is starting to produce some good players. But in terms of gifted, difference-making players, no other country is loaded with them the way we are. There are foreign players who have become legitimate NBA stars, but the few real foreign stars are spread out all over the world — not all playing side by side for the same country.

That happens only in the United States. And it’s why, really, we should expect to be the best in the world for years to come.

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By now you probably know that the U.S. men’s basketball team won the gold last night. It was a game worth staying up for — a lot of fun.

But there’s one question I haven’t been able to answer this morning. Why didn’t Rudy Fernandez, the newest Trail Blazer heart throb for sure, play in the first quarter? It wasn’t even mentioned on the broadcast and all the stories I’ve found this morning on the Web don’t address it, either. The Americans writing about the game are all so focused on the U.S. team they barely mention anything about the opposition.

Perhaps someone who speaks Spanish better than I do can find an answer somewhere out there in cyberspace? I promise to keep looking and as the day goes on, more information will be available. I’d like to know if there was some discipline thing that caused him to not play for the entire first 10 minutes. When one of your top players doesn’t play in the first quarter in a game as big as this one, something’s going on. This used to happen to Rasheed Wallace or Darius MIles when they missed a shootaround.

So if you stumble onto anything from the coach of Spain or Rudy himself, please post it in the comments or email it to me, OK?

In this one, by the way, Rudy played by far his best game. He was fearless and explosive. But his defensive problems led to some dumb fouls, which eventually caused him to foul out too fast. The guy is a fountain of charisma and if he gets a chance to play significant minutes – and the fans are going to go completely nuts if he doesn’t – he’s going to own Portland.

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The local NBC affililate in Portland has sent a reporter to cover the Olympics, which is what they do. But not a sports reporter, a NEWS reporter — probably because, you know, it’s too big of an event for a plain old sports guy. I’m sure it takes a hard news reporter to handle the enormity of it all. But since this is sort of a U.S. vs. the world sort of event, reporters feel it’s fine to fawn over our athletes. Professionalism flies right out the window. It’s nothing new but I have to tell you, for old curmudgeons like me, it can be pretty amusing.

In this blog post, KGW’s Stephanie Stricklen tells us about her encounter with some U.S. basketball stars:

“WOW. Wow. wow….

“I had a great day yesterday. First of all.. a small army of you voted and made it clear that I was supposed to, no.. destined to.. eat a scorpion. Which I did. I’ll include that in one of my 5pm reports.. probably Tuesday because I have big plans for Monday.

“Monday I want to show you what my day was like at the Team USA Basketball practice. I got to hang out with LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, and Jason Kidd. But the star of the show for me was our own Nate McMillan! He was smiling and chatty and I had a blast interviewing him about his work. And it was very refreshing to hear from some of the world’s best basketball players about what they think of him.

“Here’s a little photo slideshow.. Kobe (#10), LaBron (#6) and our own Coach McMillan are in these photos, along with other notables. Practice started with us on the gym floor with the guys. Then when the pace picked up– we moved to the second floor to give them all the room they needed. That’s when I brought out my camera (okay.. Joe Donlon’s borrowed camera that I’m learning how to use).

Team USA Basketball slideshow

“GO TEAM USA!!

“On an aside.. I was telling my friend Bill Hernandez (who emailed me to tell me how he’s liking the headband I’ve been sporting since I can’t tame my hair in this dratted 90% humidity).. amyway, I was telling Bill that when I was watching practice and interviewing these guys.. I was really impressed.

“Kobe is articulate and thoughtful. And, since this has no business in a news story, I can share it here– his skin is so flawless the dude looks like someone airbrushed on makeup. He also told me he is one of the “short” guys as I stood next to him and got a crick in my neck looking up at him.

“Jason Kidd has this sense of maturity about him. He strikes me (editor’s note: She is not the first woman to use “strikes me” when talking about Jason Kidd) as the kind of guy you will quickly learn to respect. He takes practice seriously and is business-minded. He also has very kind eyes. And LeBron? Well, LeBron is nothing but pure entertainment. He had Dwight Howard in stitches (notice the makeshift cape in the photo slideshow?). LeBron was making fun of himself.. making fun of us.. making fun of his teammates.. breakdancing (poorly), hollering, rapping, and generally living life huge.

“As one guy pointed out to me.. LeBron is young. He has energy. Yeah, I’d say so.”

I learned so much from Stephanie. Kobe Bryant is articulate? Wow, indeed. Jason Kidd has kind eyes? I guess I may have read that in a deposition somewhere. Lebron has energy? I had never noticed. Kobe’s skin, though — I think we can all agree we’ve taken note of how flawless that is.

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Ugh. Spain vs. the U.S. in men’s basketball was pretty much a waste of a sunny Saturday morning. It’s bad enough that NBC delays the game out west for three hours, but then to have all sorts of technical problems throughout — sound running ahead of the video, no audio at one stretch from the announcers (well, I guess cutting off Mike Breen’s mic isn’t a big deal) — is pretty irritating stuff.

Just a few observations about the game:

• It’s hard to tell just from television, but it doesn’t appear that it’s a whole lot of fun to be an assistant coach for the USA. Coach Mike Shush doesn’t ever seem to consult with his assistants, being so consumed with his various facial tics and barking at officials. Nate McMillan just sits there most of the time, with chin in palm watching the game.
• Jason Kidd never was much of an offensive player but now he can’t guard anyone, either. If the U.S. team ever wants to get off to a flying start in one of these contests, it would be wise to open a game without Kidd on the floor.
• Rudy Fernandez? Gosh, I’d like to tell you I’m smart enough to project exactly how good he will be in the NBA. But it’s difficult to tell when you see him in this context. I’d like to see him get a few more touches. Certainly, he has some energy and athletic ability, can shoot some from the outside and has a swagger about him. But Sergio Rodriguez had some swagger at one time, too. A couple of years here took care of that. A lot of it with Rudy will come down to whether Nate McMillan is willing to suffer Rudy’s defensive inadequacies in exchange for the offensive contributions. The guy is a nice player but I’ve seen nothing out of him in the Olympics so far to be able to say he’s going to be an NBA star.
• Two words for international referees: Call fouls. Nothing too complicated there — just call fouls when you see them. That’s not a difficult concept.

Wins like Saturday’s for the U.S. team are a familiar trap. COMPLACENCY ALERT!!! In the past, the U.S. has steamrolled teams in pool play, only to get ambushed in the medal round. Nobody in this tournament has the talent to beat Team USA if the Americans play anywhere close to their potential. But if players start getting too cute and too comfortable, they can be had — particularly when they grow accustomed to getting so much offense out of open-court situations. If somebody can keep from turning the ball over, slow the game down and make the U.S. take outside shots, a choke job is possible. We’ve seen that train wreck before.

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Whatever it is, Martha Karolyi seems to be chasing it. Her husband, Bela, may be doing the same thing whenever he’s interviewed on television (at least, I think he is — he’s so difficult to understand at times you have to guess what he’s trying to say). Honestly, when your team doesn’t give its best — and clearly the U.S. women’s gymnastics team made a ton of mistakes — you kind of forfeit your right to complain about the age of the other team, the judging or the “gamesmanship” of the opposition.

Just take your silver medals, ladies, and go have a banana split. Honestly, you could use the calories.

And really, any competition that is decided only by judges (in boxing, at least you can take it out of the judges’ hands by knocking someone out) is more beauty contest than genuine sport.

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Why do they insist on calling it women’s gymnastics? In the end, when they’re all standing up there on the medal stand, it’s going to be little girl’s gymnastics.

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